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Monday, February 17, 2014

We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks (now on video)

[WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS is now available on home video.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Right now, we're in the resurgence of abominable
child-molestation accusations against Oscar candidate Woody Allen (who may well
be innocent, but who is a filmmaker, which in my book is halfway towards being
guilty - whatever the charges).

I'm amused that it mostly seems to be well-educated women
who rise to Allen's defense...just as it was upscale feminists who slobber all
over Bill Clinton. Makes one wonder who it was women ever slept with in the
first place to get the right to vote... Oh, I remember, Warren G. Harding.
Anyway, if Ariel Castro hadn't died in prison, he'd have the girls campaigning
for him as well. Ladies love the bad boys, right, Justin Bieber?

What's my bitterness got to do with the
worthy documentary WE STEAL SECRETS? I'll try to get to that, through the
miracle of rambling, circumbendibus writing. Remember THE FIFTH ESTATE, the
dramatization of Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and the Wikileaks affair, exposing
dangerous government secrets and lies? Not many other filmgoers did, the
travails of Katniss Everdeen and Bilbo Baggins being far more relevant to their
lives (and on more screens, let's face it).

But, in the docu-feature world, name-brand documentarian
Alex Gibney told the Assange/Wikileaks affair in nonfiction form in WE STEAL
SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS, which got a Focus Features/Universal Pictures
release that actually got to auditoriums, for a while, in 2013. Here it was
released at the Cedar Lee, and it probably drew a crowd so small the Obama NSA
spies keep records of their names and addresses on a 360K five-inch floppy.
Sorry, a little old-time computer humor, there. I liked following the hacker
scene, back when things were dial-up.

WE STEAL SECRETS does open with a flashback to those old
days, when an insidious computer "worm" virus called Wanked was
evidently launched at NASA, deliberately, by a bunch of old-school hackers in
Melbourne, Australia. It is only circumstantial that later world-famous Julian
Assange, an "ethical hacker," was one of the cyber-conspirators, but
the movie makes the most of it.

Scriptwriter-director Gibney's narrative picks up years
later, as Wikileaks, Assange's website promising complete anonymity to whistleblowers
and informants in high places, goes live. First the site exposed misdeeds in
the Icelandic banking community that causes economic turmoil in that tiny
nation (how did I miss this story in the news? Guess everything about Iceland
escapes my notice if Fridrik Thor Fridriksson doesn't make a movie about it).
Then Wikileaks intelligence of corruption and abuse among Mideast regimes
fueled public rage that sparked the "Arab Spring" protests.

WE STEAL SECRETS is only half about Assange, really. The
other protagonist is Bradley Manning, the gender-confused computer enthusiast
(finding in the online world suitable forums for his cross-dressing) who would
somehow luck into a position with the US Army - one in which he could vent his
horror and discontent at being billeted among a bunch of trigger-happy rednecks
and snipers by spilling harmful Iraq- and Afghanistan-occupation military secrets to
Wikileaks.

The documentary makes the point that a lot of Manning's
goriest scoops actually circulated in and outside the military (gun-camera
footage being file-shared like proud deer-season footage). I confess, I somehow
fell behind in my atrocity-video watching, so I never had heard of
"Collateral Murder," an especially hyped Wikileaks production showing
civilians and Reuters reporters mown down by US gunfire as American soldiers
chatter (yes, they really talk like the bad-movie dialogue in BATTLESHIP) about
`lighting up' the targets. Scary stuff. Not recommended viewing for you zombies
with Chinese-made Support-the-Troops magnets on the oil-guzzlers you
drive.

Of course, these horrors (most of which, for those
keeping score, surfaced during the Obama regime) were also covered in major
news outlets. But it was on Wikileaks and Assange that the wrath of the Establishment
fell, with blowhard like Bill O'Reilly earning their thug-patriot cred by
calling for no less than Assange's execution/assassination. Had Mr. O'Reilly
asked the same fate for Assange's declared media partners, such as the editors
of The Guardian newspaper, the Fox News lineup would be rather different right
now.

But when lynch-mob justice did try to catch up with
Julian Assange, it was from a different source: two Eurotramp girls filed what
amounted to rape charges against him in Sweden. One appears onscreen here, so
heavily disguised in makeup she looked like, well, Bradley Manning in tranny
persona. And as much as the Swedish case (which sent Assange seeking political
refuge around the world) looks like a classic CIA smear, Gibney finds that, yes,
Julian Assange is a bit reckless and full of himself, in a virtual rock-star kind of way. Assange has fathered enough illegitimate children to get him drafted into the NBA, his slimy dealings with women right up there with Roman Polanski and
Woody Allen (see, told you I would get to Woody Allen, eventually).

His champions here ask that viewers please step back and
consider what Wikileaks means and the international corruption it revealed,
quite apart from the slightly dubious moral character of its figurehead. Of course,
detractors can and have criticized WE STEAL SECRETS as hardly fair and balanced, as it relies heavily on
players in the Wikileaks saga who have been the most willing to talk (often to
peddle their own memoirs). An aloof Assange, meanwhile, offered an interview with
the filmmakers only in exchange for $1 million, which they naturally refused. Either he sabotages himself, or
he doesn't know much about the cut-rate world of nonfiction cinema.

Even so, Gibney's accounting of this complicated,
not-quite-concluded story is dynamic, transfixing and carrying the heft of a
John LeCarre novel, and the cast of colorful characters is right up there with,
well, Woody Allen's exes. Probably another guy who won't be sharing a set with
Bill O'Reilly either, but you can never count out what Fox does for ratings. (3
1/4 out of 4 stars)